Inside the strange world of Amazon-to-eBay arbitrage
entrepreneur.com
entrepreneur.com
I also like how magically his entire inventory became "reserved" for a month. Competitors (with his own product) figured out how lock down his items preventing him from making further sales, which each sale guarenteed them a profit.
By the way, here's how to lock down someone's sales from Amazon's pages: "Sometimes buyers purchase in-stock items along with advanced-sale items. When this occurs, the in-stock items might not ship until all the items in their order are ready for shipment. This item will be shipped out once the advanced sale item is in stock and ready to ship."
Order all of your "competitor"'s items and put a preordered item in with them set to simultaneously ship. Cancel them as you get orders. You can guarantee yourself their inventory until you can resell it at a higher cost while they eat the fees.
In fact I watched that happen. I'd put a Ripple Rug in my Amazon cart but didn't check out. As I recall it was just under $20 with Prime shipping.
When I came back to the cart a day or two later it was unavailable.
I checked the cart from time to time, and finally it came back at around $26. (It wasn't a full month, but it was a while.)
Went ahead and ordered it. It is a little tricky to form tunnels with it and keep them from collapsing, but if your cat is a natural tunneler he will probably make his own tunnels.
It turns out our tortoiseshell kitty is more of a jumper and climber, so she mostly just uses it as a lumpy rug for a nap when the sun hits it. We have one of those crinkly hoop tunnels too and she barely uses it. But give her a chance to climb on top of anything and she's there!
I thought about returning the rug but figured nah, it wasn't worth the effort and it didn't seem right to stick the seller with a return when there was nothing wrong with it but it was just not quite kitty's thing.
Now I just checked today and it's priced at $44 on Amazon shipped from the seller, or $40 direct from the seller for the new model with the round corners. Yikes, that's quite an increase, but probably still worth it if your cat is a tunneler.
BTW if you like cute cat photos, their website has some fun ones (even if you have no interest in the rug): http://ripplerug.com/
It's a bit more expensive than selling on Amazon, depending on the item.
Looking for certain used electronics (recently music synth stuff, in the past vintage test equipment), I tend to have to select a lot of filtering options: "North american sellers only", "Condition: Used", etc.
So if your search is ordered by price, it will show their listing first when in reality, the actual item you're looking for is much more expensive.
I have no idea why ebay allows this to happen.
Ebay doesn't show the lowest-price option by default; its default is "best match", whateverTF that is. You have to explicitly choose "lowest price + shipping". I'm in the habit of always doing this, and generally researching things to death when buying online to make sure I get the best deal, but I know I'm not a normal shopper. Most people just see something that looks good and click on it and buy it.
of course she doesn't mind, her "product" is basically a quality control sticker.
> She developed a brand called Juligo, a niche in camping equipment, and found a particular hit with a headlamp. It’s just an ordinary, generic light made by a Chinese manufacturer, which she had stamped with her brand. “I’ve sold tens of thousands of those buggers, a ridiculous amount,”
however, would she still think it's awesome if someone else purchased those same headlamps from the Chinese manufacturer, put the same/similar sticker on it, had no quality control, and flooded eBay at lower cost?
Arbitrage makes money purely off of information disparities between the parties. The guy who is better plugged into the market is able to mark up items in the middle of a transaction without having to take on any risk or provide any service.
Information disparity between parties in contrast is referred to as "asymmetric information".
Since the Ali importer is buying and selling at different times, the importer is assuming the risk that the market clearing price in the US will change before their inventory can be sold.
I worked for a few years helping build a community around an arbitrage app (scan barcodes at Walmart, calculate your Amazon profit). There's really no end to people's ingenuity when it comes to identifying market inefficiencies. There's always going to be someone willing to take a risk and profit from it.
Does anybody know how this was done and what the secret was?
The plain box shipping issue provided us a direct evidence trail proving it is happening internally at Amazon. I have tracked it down the the Hebron Kentucky warehouse. Together with Entrepreneur Magazines editor we conducted a test buy/sting op. He ordered it; I tracked it on the back side of my Amazon seller account. I watched as the person used their prime account to ship it from my own inventory to the magazine editor. We have all the tracking data, blank boxes, even their real names on their Amazon account. I ran this operation a handful of times, always with the same results. This is an internal operation at Amazon.
When I informed Amazon about the issues at Hebron, and offered my evidence, everything went haywire. Within few hours of reporting it, my entire inventory was placed in reserve (over $10,000 worth) and locked down for all of June. I was completely locked out of my own inventory. Amazon was also the multi-channel fulfillment center for my website. In a blink, both of my sales channels were shut down entirely. The arbitragers flexed their muscle to show me who' the boss' in the situation was. Both my website and Amazon were now out of stock in retaliation to my reporting it to Amazon. Ironically, all my inventory was sidelined at that very same Hebron fulfillment center. This was no coincidence. Hebron center is the root of the arbitrage ring in my situation, but other warehouses participate as well. I found 3 other centers also have arbitrage rings, or they work together, but I have data for all of it.
I proved conclusively, and repetitively that there is corruption within Amazon. I ran the same operation over and over yielding the same results. It may not be Amazon itself, however Amazons employees are running the show when it comes to the high level arbitraging. I recorded phone calls, have screen shots of everything. I sent Amazon lengthy message detailing everything. Amazon has turned a blind eye. These Amazon employees have the ability to manipulate the package details, inventory status, boxing preference, pretty much free run of the Amazon computer systems to do as they wish. they actually 'ghost' information so it looks as if nothing was manipulated (lucky i screen shot everything).
Lastly, when i tracked the real names of these people involved, they all live within a few miles of an Amazon fulfillment center and the all have computer science background. this is not a small isolated incident. I can prove millions in losses to this scheme, and with some digging, it might be billions.
crazy days ahead
thanks for any insight you can provide
Fred
FWIW, these are going away come Sept 1, 2016 anyway: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageI...
My advice to you is to focus less on the hassle caused by eBay arbitragers and focus more on growing your product lines... I sell on AZ and have experienced various issues with return fraud, competitors messing with listing descriptions, Chinese counterfeit takeovers, feedback fraud, etc. At one point I had a competitor order & ship 40+ items and then return them all in unsalable condition.
You can only fight it so much before you realize your energy is best spent growing your bottom line rather than trying to solve the 1% that is a nuisance. Best thing to do is document everything though and keep a well-regulated forward press on the AZ Seller Support, as you've been doing. But don't let it consume you.
Granted, that would only work if you only bought one item. If you bought multiple items they would have to be packaged together in another Amazon-branded box.
[1] Labor and/or robot maintenance costs.
This is why 3rd party arbitrage is good for the economy. It fills in gaps in supply/demand.
Edit: also I should note that Ripple Rug looks awesome. Buying one for my cat. Articles like this talking about your business experience are good marketing engines :)
You can search on ebay for "2 day shipping" and almost all of them are people doing this
I wont even begin about how they use an Amazon issued credit card to get an additional 3% cash back on the purchase, or that they use an Amazon affiliate link to get another 5 to 8% commission. That is a whole story in itself.